


Weight

by greenfinch



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 08:24:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenfinch/pseuds/greenfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which John has post-Reichenbach angst (because don't we all), namely in a psychosomatic form.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weight

It starts as soon as he walks away from the grave. Before everything, before the chases and the crime solving, before– he was so used to it that he barely notices when his weight shifts towards the right side, and when he turns away for the last time he continues to put most of his weight on the right.

He would have said it was psychosomatic. He would have been right. If he came back perhaps he could take the place of the limp.

He isn’t coming back. He’s–

\---

Like all pain it comes and goes. Sometimes it’s barely there, sometimes he registers it on some level, but there are moments when the pain is excruciating. Nearly unbearable, and accompanied by the sickening twist in his stomach that means the cab he’s in passes by the old flat, that a few bars of violin solo reach his ears, that he catches sight of a long, dark coat vanishing around a street corner.

\---

With him, he used to do so much running around, chasing after cabs and murderers and criminal masterminds. Now he sits, reads novels, watches reality shows. Leaves his phone at home as often as possible, only goes out to make sure his refrigerator isn’t completely bare.

His schedule of sleeping and waking was never set before. The new routine of coming home, sleeping, and waking up in the morning at a normal, human hour also comes with a routine pain as he comes down the stairs in the morning.

He’s become too used to sitting now and gets up only out of necessity. His leg screams in protest each time.

\---

“We need to discuss this.”

Mycroft looks nothing like him, and John is grateful, though he can’t bear the sight of him nonetheless. He knows it isn’t entirely his fault, but he’s the only one alive he can blame aside from himself. 

And he already puts too much blame on himself. Any more and he wouldn’t be able to leave the house at all.

“I’ve told you- I’ve told you everything I need to say.”

“But not everything you want to say.”

Unfortunately, Mycroft shares his brother’s uncanny insight into what John is thinking.

He laughs but his mouth doesn’t smile. Nothing smiles.

“You don’t want to hear everything I want to say.”

His intention is to get up and leave. He gets up and gasps at the pain. According to his leg, being in the same room with Mycroft is as bad as thinking about Sherlock.

“I- I need help,” he manages to cough out.

\---

He dreams he’s back on Baker Street. He sits in his usual chair, relaxed, the bittersweet strains of a violin floating to him from somewhere else in the flat. It seems to be coming from everywhere, raw music ringing all around his mind. When he gets up from the chair it’s as if he doesn’t have legs at all – he simply floats out of it and over to the window. He looks down, out onto Baker Street; his gaze falls on the figure sprawled on its side on the pavement as the violin music stops suddenly and violently.

He sits up in the dark. He realizes his hand has instinctively gone to the box on his nightstand containing his gun. He sighs air out from his lungs and relaxes the fingers that clutch at the latch of the box. The feeling has come back to his legs, but so has the ache in his left. It makes its presence known and presses on the rest of him, into his chest and eyes and mind, until it forces him back into sleep.


End file.
